Steps to Protecting PII for Privacy and Compliance

Information that can be used to find out who a person is is called personally identifiable information (PII). Along with more traditional pieces of PII like name, mailing address, email address, date of birth, Social Security number, and phone number, IP addresses, login IDs, personally identifiable financial information (PIFI), and even social media posts are now also considered PII.

This broad definition of PII means that organisations that collect, process, and store PII must think about security and privacy issues. To make it easier to understand, PII can be put into two groups: sensitive and non-sensitive.

Public records make it easy to get PII that is not sensitive, like a person's race, gender, or zip code. This kind of information is often easy to find, and if it is sent without encryption, it probably won't hurt the person.

Sensitive PII, like passport, driver's licence, and Social Security numbers, on the other hand, needs to be encrypted both in transit and at rest to keep the person from getting hurt if their PII gets into the wrong hands. Encrypting PII can protect people from credit damage and identity theft. It can also protect your business from lost revenue, fines for not following the rules, or damage to its reputation.

Understanding the Risk of PII That Isn't Safe

Every business store and uses PII, whether it's about its employees or its customers. Take a mortgage company as an example. In order to process loans, the company must collect and process PII. Most likely, their customers are sending this PII to them via fax, FTP, or email, which are all older methods.

Without encryption, these methods don't give customers the privacy, control, and visibility of their data that they need to have a good experience. Also, it puts the organisation at risk of a breach and of not meeting compliance standards.

As organisations collect, process, and store PII, they must also take care to keep this sensitive information safe. Even though data breaches can happen at any level of organisation sophistication, like the recent one at First American, the effects on the organisation are often the same: they are expensive, time-consuming, and harmful.

Limiting your organization's risk of being exposed to possible threats goes beyond just protecting it from attacks that are meant to do harm. If an employee isn't careful, PII could be given to people who shouldn't have it. Your organisation is still responsible for the lost data, no matter how it happened.

How to Start Securing PII Today?

Because PII is so valuable to bad guys who can sell it on the black market for a lot of money, it is important that your business always protects incoming PII, no matter how it is used. If you don't do this, you leave yourself open to attacks, fines, and loss of customer trust. Here are six steps you can take right now to start protecting PII that comes in:

Find out what PII your company uses: Start by making a list of all the PII that your company collects, uses, and processes. Once you know what it is, you can start thinking about how to keep it safe and private.

Find out where PII is kept: PII data could be stored on servers, in the cloud, or even on the laptops of employees. Don't forget to think about these three data states: Data in use, data at rest, and data in transit. This will help you learn more about the different systems you need to keep safe.

Sort PII by how sensitive it is: Once you've found all the PII and know where it is, you can rate it based on how likely it is to be stolen and what could happen if the data is exposed. This helps you decide which systems and data to protect first and in what order.

Set up a policy on what is acceptable: If you don't already have an acceptable use policy (AUP) for accessing PII, you should make one. This policy says who can get access to PII and how it can be used. This policy can be used as a starting point for building controls that use technology to make sure that PII is accessed and used in the right way.

Implement an encryption solution: Find a solution that relies as little as possible on trust. Data-centric encryption will protect your organization's PII from both internal and external risks and put customers at ease when you ask for their most sensitive information.

Your answer should be backed up by training: Your encryption solution is only as good as the people who use it, no matter how good it is. Make sure to train your employees often on both new technology and new threats. Customers should also know how to use your encryption solution in the best way. Remember that encryption software that is easy to use will help more people use it.

Encrypting PII for the Highest Level of Safety

Data-centric encryption is a key best practise for organisations that need to protect PII that comes in and is shared within and outside the organisation. Also, you will need the right controls. For example, if you use the same mortgage company as an example, you need to be able to limit access to fewer people over the course of a loan application for the upcoming CCPA to be followed.

To implement solutions for pii data encryption, we recommend to visit here https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/use-cases/pii and ensure data privacy. Compliance isn't the only reason to protect PII, though. By putting an emphasis on data security and privacy, you can help your customers have a better experience and make it easier for them to communicate while keeping their privacy safe.

This not only helps build customer loyalty and trust, but it also makes sure that your tech investments can keep up with changing needs.